The Franklin Conspiracy Read online

  Indeed, it was Captain Penny’s irate opinion that this was exactly what had happened. According to historian Leslie Neatby, “In an unpublished letter to his father, [Elisha Kent] Kane [doctor on the American ship, Advance] tells how when Penny arrived and learned from the Americans of the traces discovered and the empty cairn, he broke into a rage declaring that the cairn must have contained a notice of Franklin’s intended course and Ommanney suppressed it to keep the others searching in wrong directions.”4 This was obviously a serious charge to make, particularly since Penny, though originally hired by Lady Franklin, was effectively employed by the Navy for the duration of the search. Did he have concrete evidence to back up his suspicions of foul play or was he merely guessing? We don’t know; but this wasn’t to be the end of Penny’s charges against his naval co-searchers.

  JOHN ROSS SHOWS HIS HAND

  After leaving a report of the find made at nearby Cape Riley, the British set off toward Cape Walker.

  Incredibly, within mere days, three of the five expeditions had arrived at Beechey Island: Penny, the two American ships, and of course, John Ross. A search was begun as men fanned out across the barren, cliff-backed island.

  At the same time, Penny took up the search from Cape Riley with the crew of his second ship. Quickly he found evidence of a shooting station at Cape Spencer on Devon Island on the opposite side of the causeway from Beechey. There were the remains of a stone hut, scraps of newspaper dated to the year before Franklin had set out, a torn piece of paper bearing the words “until called”, but no indication of anything more than a brief visit.

  Ross could see for himself that Franklin was not to be found on Beechey Island. The navy ships would soon return. If he truly believed Franklin had gone to Victory Point, Ross would never have a better chance to set out than now. He told Elisha Kent Kane that he intended to sail over to inform Lady Franklin’s ship Prince Albert of the Beechey Island find.

  He expected to find them in Prince Regent Inlet.

  Why? Kane himself (aboard the Advance) had encountered Captain Forsyth leaving Prince Regent Inlet. They had still been together when Forsyth learned of the Beechey Island find from the cairn on Cape Riley. Ross must surely have known that Forsyth was not to be found in Prince Regent Inlet, that the Prince Albert was already headed back to England. Was this merely a ruse, an excuse to allow Ross to winter in Prince Regent Inlet, and from there seek one of the passages through Boothia-Somerset? With Captain Austin’s ships between Ross and Cape Walker, that route would no longer have been an option. As well, he may already have realized, as Austin discovered, that the ice was too thick in the west, preventing any ship from reaching Cape Walker.

  We can only wonder if this was the moment when Ross would finally have revealed his true intentions, because, even as Ross was returning to his ship, a crucial and frightening discovery was being made by one of Penny’s men. John Ross’ plans, whatever they might have been, were once again waylaid.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Dead of Beechey Island

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are only coral made:

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  William Shakespeare,

  The Tempest

  GRAVE WARNINGS

  “Graves, Captain Penny! Graves! Franklin’s winter quarters!”

  And graves there were, three of them all neatly set in a row, with three headstones, each “made after the old orthodox fashion of gravestones back home”, in the words of Elisha Kent Kane.1 As the searchers gathered around to read the inscriptions, they must have shivered in a way having nothing to do with the howling wind. Two of the men—John Torrington and John Hartnell—had died within only four days of each other, even though they had served on separate ships. The first, Torrington, had been lead stoker stationed aboard the Terror, while Hartnell was an able seaman from the Erebus. Torrington had died on New Year’s Day, 1846. The third grave belonged to Private William Braine, a Royal Marine also serving aboard the Erebus. He had died in the early spring of the same year, April 3rd, 1846.

  These dates told the searchers what they most wanted to know: Franklin had camped on Beechey Island during the winter of 1845-46, his first in the Arctic. Dr. Kane and the others must have noticed how closely the second death had followed the first and wondered whether there might be a connection. If so, it would have been difficult to imagine what; the two men had different professions and served on different ships. And then there was William Braine to consider. Three deaths during a first winter was odd by any standards. Provisions would still have been plentiful and scurvy—the bane of Arctic travellers—should not have set in. What could have happened?

  But by far the strangest and most disturbing discoveries were the two chilling Biblical passages inscribed on Hartnell’s and Braine’s headstones. On the first stone the grim message ran: “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways.” The marine’s similarly ominous inscription instructed: “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.” Understandably, the searchers were puzzled (and unnerved) by such dark and frightening sentiments, and they wondered if these hinted at some terrible incident which had led to the two men’s deaths. Had there been a mutiny, perhaps?

  Franklin was very much a Bible-quoting man, and it was suspected that he had most likely been the author of the inscriptions. But, as everyone knew, it was vital for the commander of an Arctic expedition to do what he could to keep up his crew’s spirits during the long, black winter months. Great lengths were taken to ensure that gloom and despondency didn’t have a chance to settle over the men, as expeditions organized plays and balls, and printed satiric newspapers; the two ships of Franklin’s expedition had even carried two hand organs, one of which played fifty tunes. A crewman’s death could act as a dangerous catalyst, planting seeds of fear and depression in the others. At such times, what could possibly have caused Franklin to place such frightening quotations on the graves of the two men?

  William Braine’s inscription grows more eerie still when seen in the context of the full passage from which it was taken: “If it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, chose ye this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served which were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell.”

  The gods of the Amorites? In whose land ye dwell?

  It was, to put it mildly, bizarre. What could Franklin have been thinking of?

  Still, as weird and inexplicable as this might have been, the searchers could never have imagined how much stranger still were the contents of those graves around which they solemnly gathered. Nor could they have guessed that it would be a full 134 years before another searcher, still doggedly following the track of Franklin’s lost expedition, would finally dig up those three graves, revealing for the first time their amazing occupants, and study them with technology which would have seemed little short of magic to the seaman of that ancient era. Had they known what lay below the frozen gravel beneath their feet, perhaps more than a few of them would have had second thoughts about their quest for the lost expedition.

  THE AUTOPSY OF JOHN TORRINGTON

  But every one of those men went to his grave without knowing the secret of those three graves. It was not until August 17, 1984, that Owen Beattie, a physical anthropologist with the University of Alberta, set about the difficult task of exhuming the first of the three graves, that of John Torrington. Beattie recounted his remarkable experiment in his excellent book Frozen in Time (co-written with John Geiger). As he explained, “Because of his special interest in forensic anthropology, Beattie had assisted in numerous investigations conducted by the medical examiner’s offices, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other police forces.”2 It was his hope that by applying the same modern methods of physical anthropology to the ancient problem of the Franklin exped
ition, it might be possible at long last to find some explanation for why the voyage had met with disaster.

  On August 17, having finally received permission to begin the exhumation (having already dug down through 1.5 feet of frozen permafrost), Beattie and his party set to work. As their digging was on the verge of exposing the buried coffin lid, something strange occurred. Suddenly a great black cloud gathered over the camp and the wind rose, almost as if the forces of the Arctic itself were rearing up, bent on hindering their mission. Beattie wrote, “The conditions had suddenly become so strange that Kowal observed, ‘This is something out of a horror movie.’”3 Though they tried to continue, the weather rapidly grew worse. In spite of all their scientific expertise, the group was so unnerved by the experience that Beattie was forced to call a halt to the excavation, postponing the operation until the following day. Before finally blowing itself out, the storm vented its fury during the night in the form of a violent gust of wind that wrenched up the tent covering the half-dug grave, heaving it disdainfully onto the adjacent ridge of beach. If Beattie had been inclined toward a belief in the supernatural, he would surely have taken this as a very inauspicious omen.

  The following day, the team finally succeeded in uncovering the coffin. On the lid was a tin hand-painted crest that read: “John Torrington died January 1st, 1846, aged 20 years”. By shearing the nails holding down the lid, the team was able to open the coffin. Inside they found a solid block of ice, which had to be melted using buckets of warm water. But once this was done, they found the body of Torrington to be incredibly well-preserved after 138 years in the ground.

  Beattie thought, “John Torrington looked anything but grotesque. The expression on his thin face, with the pouting mouth and the half-closed eyes gazing through delicate, light-brown eye lashes, was peaceful.”4 One can admire Beattie’s sensitivity, but the photographs taken of Torrington’s corpse produce an altogether different impression. The lifelike preservation was incredible, but the effects of so prolonged a time in the ice had still had a profound effect. The discoloured lips were hideously curled outward, like the mouth on an ancient Greek theatrical mask, exposing the yellow teeth clenched in a simulation of a ghastly snarl (the jaws were held closed by a polka dot handkerchief wrapped under the chin). The nose and forehead were darkly stained from a blue cloth that had been found covering the face and the eyes had a disturbing half-lidded gaze, like the blind stare of a Hollywood zombie.

  After removing Torrington’s body from the coffin, an autopsy was begun. Unfortunately, because of Torrington’s 138 years of frozen burial in the high Arctic, the results of that autopsy were not easy to interpret. Beattie found Torrington to be incredibly thin and wasted, with very few fat reserves. Beattie felt this was evidence that Torrington had been ill for some time before his death. But how much might this be blamed on the effects of prolonged freezing and dehydration? No one could say for sure, because no one had ever dug up a body under these precise circumstances before. Most of the corpse’s cellular structure had been broken down, then further dissolved by the cells’ own enzymes. Beattie could find no food in either the stomach or the bowel, nor were there callouses on the stoker’s fingers. All this seemed to confirm Beattie’s theory that Torrington had been ill for a considerable period. On the other hand, no bed sores were found on the body, which might have been expected if Torrington had been so ill that he couldn’t eat. The lack of callouses might also be explained if, for some reason, Torrington had been punished with a prolonged stay in the brig.

  Tissue samples were taken, including samples from the brain, to be analyzed by Roger Amy at the University Hospital in Edmonton, but “despite careful study of the organ samples . . . a specific cause of death could not be established.”5

  Plenty of evidence was found, however, indicating that Torrington had never been a healthy man (which makes one wonder what he was doing on the expedition in the first place), including signs of emphysema and tuberculosis. Based on scarring around the lungs as well as some fluid found within the lung, Beattie surmised that Torrington had perhaps died of pneumonia. But of far greater importance was Beattie’s discovery of elevated levels of lead both in Torrington’s bones and in his hair.

  Beattie had previously wondered whether lead poisoning might have played a part in the Franklin disaster after he had found elevated levels in bones recovered from King William Island. Now this further evidence seemed to bolster his unusual hypothesis.

  A DISTURBED GRAVE

  Beattie did not return to Beechey Island to exhume the other two bodies, those of Hartnell and Braine, until two years later. On their previous visit, Beattie’s team had gone so far as to partially excavate the grave of John Hartnell, and they had been surprised to find unmistakable evidence that someone had dug down to the coffin before them. The coffin lid had been badly damaged and cloth had been pulled out from the right side.

  During the two intervening years, Beattie learned that it was Captain Edward Inglefield and Dr. Peter Sutherland who had dug down to the coffin in September 1852 (two years after the graves were first discovered by Ross, Penny, and Kane). Inglefield was at Beechey as captain of the Isabel, a steam yacht bought and outfitted by Jane Franklin with public funds, there to take on mail from a five-ship naval flotilla sent in search of Franklin.

  In a strikingly mysterious omission, there is no mention of the exhumation in Inglefield’s published journal. Beattie observed that “there is a blank period in it covering the time between when he [Inglefield] and Sutherland finished dining with the officers of the North Star and the departure of the Isabel from Beechey Island shortly after midnight”, the precise period during which the exhumation occurred.6 It is a curious oversight given the obvious importance of this undertaking. As a result, Beattie only learned of the operation through an unpublished letter from Inglefield to Rear-Admiral Francis Beaufort. Incredibly, Inglefield claimed that they worked only by moonlight so that it was through touch alone that he determined Hartnell had died of a “wasting illness”.

  Beattie commented that, based on his experience, it would have taken three people twenty hours to dig down to the coffin, from which he surmised that Inglefield’s crew had actually been digging all that day, while their captain was aboard the North Star. He further argued that the entire operation must have been carefully planned in advance, because of the short amount of time during which Inglefield remained on Beechey Island. And yet, we are to believe Inglefield didn’t think to bring a lantern? Knowing how much might depend on what he found in the grave, does it really make sense that Inglefield would have been content to use touch alone to determine the cause of death?

  But why should Inglefield lie about such a thing? What reason could he have had for omitting mention of the exhumation in his journal? Is it possible he discovered something in the grave, something which he felt he could not make public? If so, then what?

  A DISTURBED CORPSE

  The answer to that question may have been provided in part by Beattie’s exhumation of able seaman Hartnell.

  The body of John Hartnell was found, like Torrington’s, to be exceedingly well-preserved. Also, like Torrington, the lips had curled outwards in the same grotesque fashion, exposing the clenched teeth. The eyes, though, had suffered considerable damage, both sinking back into their sockets—a result, Beattie believed, brought about by the brief periods during which the body had been thawed both by Inglefield and by Beattie’s team during their previous excavation. Hartnell’s arms had been bound to his body using a light-brown woollen binding, but the right arm had been removed from the binding—presumably by Inglefield—and left loose beside the body.

  This time, Beattie had brought along a portable X-ray machine. Once Hartnell’s body was removed from the coffin, the corpse was X-rayed, only to reveal something very odd. The brain would not show up properly on the X-ray because it had frozen into a solid block of ice. This became stranger still when the X-rays of William Braine would reveal no such solid ice in
his head even though he had been buried under the same conditions as Hartnell.

  Yet, what amazed the team even more was the discovery that “[Hartnell’s] internal organs appeared uncharacteristic and of unusual and varied densities.”7 Apart from his skeleton, very little could be distinguished on the exposures. While it was possible that the unusual conditions under which the X-rays were taken might have had something to do with the problem, the team was nonetheless bothered by the unexpected find. But an explanation was soon discovered, when they undressed the body in preparation for an autopsy.

  To their astonishment, they found Hartnell had already been autopsied. And yet, they noticed a curious anomaly about this autopsy. In standard autopsies a Y-shaped incision is made, with the arms of the Y starting at the shoulders and coming together at the base of the breastbone, the straight part then extending down to the pubic bone. In this case, the Y was upside down. The arms began at either hip, came together at the belly button, then the straight part ran up to the top of the breastbone. Was this just the way autopsies were performed back in the mid-1800s? No one knew. Beattie wrote, “The procedures for autopsy technique in the mid-nineteenth century are not well-represented in scientific literature.”8 But even more puzzles awaited the team as they set about reopening the sutured incision.

  They originally thought that perhaps the upside-down incision indicated the doctor responsible was mainly interested in examining the bowel. However, once inside the body it became clear that whoever had done the procedure had concentrated on the heart and lungs—the bowel had not even been touched. The heart had been removed and then two cuts had been made, one into each ventricle. The roots of the lungs had been dissected and then the liver as well. None of this was especially odd, although it was unclear why the ship’s doctor should have decided to autopsy Hartnell when he hadn’t autopsied Torrington who had died only days before.